About gene

I was driving this past weekend and sitting in traffic when the TED Radio Hour started on Chicago Public Radio. The first segment was fascinating and is very enlightening when considering law firm culture, or any business for that matter, and firm growth through lateral hiring of “stars”. I have included the link to the show at the bottom of this post, and it is definitely worth your time. Although I'm highlighting the first link, Margaret Heffernan - Is The Professional Pecking Order Doing More Harm Than Good, the entire hour is useful for anyone who runs a business or recruits and develops top talent. A quick spoiler alert – I am going to give away the results of the study referenced in the first segment, so go listen at the link below if you want to hear the set-up first. So here’s the study in a nutshell. William Muir, a professor of Animal Sciences at Purdue University studied the productivity of chickens. Although that may sound odd, productivity is easy to measure in chickens since you just need to count eggs. Muir wanted to know what could make chickens more productive, so he devised an experiment. Chickens live in groups, so he first selected an average flock, and he let progress as it normally would for six generations. That was the control group. He also created a second group comprised of the most productive chickens he could find (our superchickens) and he then assembled them in a superflock. For [...]

“We’d sooner recruit for the right profile than the right capability because you can develop capability...” - Leading Edge’s group CEO Struan Abernethy Read more on...Why the wrong cultural fit can be a disaster

Baseball, Data and the Unhappy Attorney I was an unhappy attorney – unhappy enough in my first law firm job that I was looking for an exit even before I found out that I passed the bar exam. The road to being a “recovering attorney” has taken me through a number of careers in and around the legal industry, and each has made me far happier than my first law firm experience long ago. There are a lot of unhappy attorneys and the numbers grow every year. That said, there is hope for reversing this trend. Although many of you might disagree with me, there are a lot of happy attorneys. Thanks to the data from 2000+ lawyers who took part in The Right Profile’s Attorney Trait Study, we actually understand the many profiles of happiness across 26 different practice areas and 12 practice settings. The reason that this is important is that we can now use this data to help attorneys, law students and even prospective law students find their best career fit without the painful, gut-wrenching stumble that often takes attorneys through multiple firms or even out of law altogether. The lack of guidance that prevents many from finding their proper fit in law also keeps many attorneys in law much longer than they would like to be (and much unhappier with their lives overall) as ever increasing tuition bills drive decisions to stay in a law firm role as long as possible to help pay down [...]